| OUR RATING:
6.3
GOOD
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TANGIBLES:
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Why you should buy it: You just own the Wii and are desperate for something that’s more like what you can find on the Xbox 360 or PS3.
Why you should rent it: You don’t want to pay for sloppy seconds but still want to see what they are like. |
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UNIQUE RATING:
6.3
  SUGGESTION:
Rent It |
Written by: Chris Selogy | Tags: Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, Nintendo Wii
Chop Till You Drop’s story still takes place in Willamette, Colorado where an incident has occurred to cause the creation of zombies that catches the eye of photojournalist Frank West, who wants the scoop on what is going on in this small town. You land at the mall where zombies manage to break in and Frank must try to get to the bottom of this zombie outbreak while saving as many people as he can. The story is mainly confined to the eight cases that provide the backbone of the game’s story with quite a few side missions, called scoop missions in the game, that allow you to find and rescue survivors with the help of Otis, who mans the security room that you find refuge in during the game.
The big change in Chop Till You Drop is that these scoop missions aren’t revealed and end in real-time as you play the game, but are presented by Otis so that you can play through them one by one with just a timer to worry about. This definitely keeps Otis from being the annoying presence that he is in the Xbox 360 version and makes those missions more manageable for the OCD gamers out there. Fans of the Xbox 360 version will definitely notice that the scoop missions have been shifted around so they are presented in different orders at different times, which keeps the experience feeling a bit fresher for those seeing how this port has turned out but could be a negative for those wanting a strict port. The main issue is that it keeps the game from feeling like the sandbox experience that it originally was since every mission or case you’re sent out on is done one at a time without any seamless transitions.
There are definitely issues with Chop Till You Drop as a whole when comparing it to the Xbox 360 version. The mall as a whole has been turned from an open sandbox into a linear experience with storefronts being closed off with a velvet rope to force you to zigzag a lot when you traverse the mall. The lack of the ability to jump also enforces this somewhat claustrophobic experience since you can’t jump onto fountains, climb up areas, and even get into the water pools that are located around the mall. Annoying enemies have been added early on to the usual mob of zombies you’ll see that include parrots, poodles, giant female cop tank zombies, and even those same parrots with the added ability to drop grenades on you that make simple treks to the different parts of the more aggravating when you see the same tank, poodle, or parrot spawn in the same spots when revisiting the same areas that serve to annoy more than challenge you. You do get extra experience from taking down those enemies, but you tend to take them down more because they’ll annoy you if you don’t take them down right away versus trying to move past them.
The main campaign of Chop Till You Drop is largely on the easy side on the normal difficulty, which the choice of difficulty is one of the new additions that may be welcome for many. Bosses are fairly easy to defeat with a good stock of bullets and decent aim to get by without losing much health at all. While not as many zombies appear on screen as they do on the Xbox 360 version, they spawn enough that it’s not too much of an issue though that also adds to the ease of the game as whole when you don’t have hordes that are as massive as they were in the original. The controversial save system has been reworked here to allow for up to 20 different saves at once but also offers the option to save after missions often enough that you’re not going hours without the option to save anymore. Death also brings new options as you’re allowed to try again from the last checkpoint, which the game is fairly lenient with, alongside the previous options to reload the save or start over while carrying your stats over to the new save when you die.
Being a port that uses the Resident Evil 4 Wii engine, Chop Till You Drop adopted a few of this quirks in the porting process. The camera is pulled in tighter on Frank and is always behind his back unless you get Frank stuck in an animation, such as when you are changing clothes. Zombies will drop ammo, food, and money when killed with that same vertically-glowing light and once you fight Cletus, who runs the gun shop, you are able to buy more powerful guns, bigger ammo containers, and buy books and abilities to upgrade your abilities and attacks that are at your disposal. The use of the Wii Remote for aiming your guns works very well, though the control scheme is a bit clunky since picking up items, opening doors, talking to people, and quite a few other actions are done by pressing both the Z and A buttons at the same time, which is odd to do during missions when the Z or C buttons themselves are not used at all to do any actions.
Because Chop Till You Drop is on the Wii, you can’t possibly expect it to look nearly as good as the Xbox 360 version does. It looks fairly good for a Wii game with a nice job of getting as much as possible from the Xbox 360 version into the Wii version. The game runs fairly smoothly with some framerate hitches here and there but nothing that really ruins the game. Because the Wii doesn’t have the focus on HD visuals as the original, the small text issue’s been remedied here for much more readable text. The sounds of zombies and the many other sound effects are nicely done here to make you feel more like you’re surrounded by zombies than you may actually see.
The main reason you would really considering trying out Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop is if you only own the Wii or have the Xbox 360 version and want to try out this somewhat remixed version of the original. It’s a decent port that does a good job to capture the spirit of the original even though it can’t really do the entire game justice. There’s not much reason to buy this if you’re looking for something a bit more faithful to the original, which is why the recent announcement of the sequel is a great thing. Do yourself a favor by renting this to see the end result of this port and put a bigger investment on the sequel instead.
| The town of Willamette, Colorado in Dead Rising is a spoof on Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was filmed. This is also where Zack & Miri Make a Porno is located and featured scenes in the famed mall itself and a fictitious hockey team called the Monroeville Zombies. |
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Gamer 2.0 Rating: 5.3 | Hype Rating: N/A
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Gamer 2.0 Rating: 8.1 | User Rating: 7.9
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